


The Prince & the Psiioniic

by Wildcard



Category: Homestuck
Genre: AU, F/F, F/M, M/M, also kingdoms get invaded, and all that good shit, dirk is a prince, magic happens, sollux is a mage
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-12-05
Updated: 2012-12-05
Packaged: 2017-11-20 08:58:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/583569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wildcard/pseuds/Wildcard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sollux Captor is a Doom-aligned student mage who suddenly has two princes standing in his bedroom arguing over whose court he should work at. </p>
<p>He's also pretty sure that one of them is hitting on him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Prince & the Psiioniic

Your name is Sollux Captor and you are staring at two princes and the head of your mage school, all three of whom just interrupted you while you were trying to work out a particularly complicated ~ath spell in the supposed privacy of your own chambers. 

When the door swung open, you’d had your forked tongue between your teeth, ink all over your fingers and bees humming pleasantly in a corner as they sorted through the spools of energy you gave off. It took a pointed cough to make you look up.

And now you have no clue what to do. Your room is too small to hold all four of you and besides, you just don’t want to have so many people in your space. Even if one of them is the head of the school and the other two are royalty. Well. They’re either royalty or they have pretensions thereof, given the crowns that the two of them are wearing.

The headmaster solves your problem with her usual pompous aplomb.

“Your Highnesses, this is Sollux Captor, Level 3 Mage. He is a very promising psiionic with a strong Doom-affiliation. Sollux, this is Prince Eridan Ampora and Prince Dirk Strider.” Aranea’s words makes you scramble to your feet and bow as you realize what’s happening. They’re searching for a Royal Mage! True, a Level 3 wouldn’t usually be considered for the post but Doom is a rare affiliation. It’s usually seen in battle mages who are all strength and no subtlety, unlike you and your hive of bee familiars.

“Your Highnesses.” You lisp and wonder what they make of it as you straighten up from your bow and give them a toothy smile. Royal Mage is a plush job, one that’ll give you plenty of time to pursue your own interests while you have access to all sorts of resources. You want this.

You eye them surreptitiously from behind your dual-colored shades, sizing them up to see which is more likely to match you well. Prince Eridan has the greyish skin and earfins of a seadweller, bright purple eyes magnified by the rectangular glasses he’s wearing. His forelock is purple, a color that is considered royal, and he has a scarf wrapped around his throat to protect his gills. His crown looks like it’s made of polished iron draped and braided like seaweed, studded with pearls and almost like the laurel wreaths that the winners of the Games receive. However, the disdainful wrinkle of his nose and the sneer that curls his thin lips makes you very quickly lose interest in him and turn his attention to the other prince.

Prince Dirk is a land dweller and from his light pink skin, he looks to have a lot of human in him. His hair’s pale gold and the wrought gold crown he bears is all spikes and swirls, unadorned with any gems. His eyes are hidden too behind dark, pointy shades and his face is so expressionless that you’re sure he has to approve of you. Royalty’s never been shy about showing their disapproval of anything, after all. 

Good. You want him to like you. He looks young but one day, he’ll be the ruler and you’ll be the Royal Mage.

First you’ll have to convince him to hire you. “My focus is the —”

“Doesn’t your lisp interfere with your ability to cast spells?” Prince Eridan interrupts rudely.

You pause in your explanation and raise one eyebrow above your dual colored lenses, tilting your head in a way that you know makes the slow blink you give the sea dwelling prince entirely visible. “Do you know anything about how ~ath works, or magics and psionics in general, much less the doom alignment?” 

Your tone is scathing and in this moment you don’t care one bit if you are never placed as a royal mage. Your patience is limited and questions that are so absolutely stupid will result in you zapping his royal ass eventually anyway. Anyone that knows even the slightest bit about how actual magic behaves would already know spells aren’t spoken but instead, performed by mage-bonded familiars. 

“I write spells and use my bees as a vector to cast them. My psionics are the only thing that I directly control.” You dumb the explanation down and use the same tone of voice you would if you were talking to a baby grubbling, then let the bite of sarcasm come back into your voice as you inquire, “Any other stupid questions you want to ask?”

“Sollux Captor.” The stress that Prince Dirk puts on the last name makes your hearts sink. You know what’s coming and ready yourself for it as Prince Dirk keeps talking, his tone as neutral and flat as his face, “Are you any relation to Mituna Captor?”

Oh. That’s not a stupid question at all. Most non-mages don’t make the link; at least one of the princes must’ve done some research before coming here.

You nod and you know that your face is as blank as his. “Older cousin.” Practically a brother. 

Mituna had always been around your home when you’d been a child, teasing you and teaching you at the same time, telling you about how to use honey to boost your powers without burning yourself out. You remember being a toddler being psionically flown about and giggling, always giggling, sparking red and blue with delight as the two of you swooped over the lands like birds. He’d had the sort of power you’d wanted when you grew up; nobody had been surprised when the Condesce had handpicked him while he was still in college and courted him to become her Royal Mage.

Everyone had been surprised when she chose to still keep him on at court even after he’d burned himself out and had no power left.

You wait for the familiar, weak words, to hear the almost ritualistic ‘my condolences’ that treats Mituna as if he’s dead already, and you feel both your hearts grow cold and hard. You have learnt you cannot afford to be hurt by this.

Prince Dirk says nothing, though, just gives a minute nod. It’s a fourth voice that speaks up, jarring and too loud. 

“Mituna, huh? I knew him before he became a total ret—” 

You’re not sure if it’s your glare or the way that Prince Dirk turns fractionally to look at him, but either way, the asshole with the greased back hair and the oversized crown stops himself mid-sentence. “Retroactive hero. Cool guy, good to talk to. Never repeats anything you tell him. Or maybe he does and nobody can understand him since he talks like a toothless fish.”

“King Cronus, you are done examining the other candidates already?” Aranea is practically fawning over him, completely indifferent to what an absolute fucking idiot the man is and you feel a sick bubble of hatred start in your stomach and start to float upwards. Your moods have always been changeable; you’ve gone from wanting to appeal to wanting to kill.

The bees buzz angrily, rising like a living wall between you and the sea king. The ~ath command for them to kill was one of the first that they learnt. You wonder for a moment what the penalty is for killing a monarch in front of his son, another prince and the head of the best mage school on the continent. You wonder if you even could kill him before Aranea intervenes. She’s mostly a lecturer these days but you know she’s still powerful — and very, very lucky. Just like her niece, Vriska, who surely must’ve been one of the other candidate that King Cronus was examining. You can’t imagine Vriska taking well to Cronus’ attitude. Her temper’s even worse than yours. If you want to attack him already, surely she must’ve actually done so.

Your anger dies a little at that thought but only a little. Whatever Vriska might’ve done to him, it won’t have been to defend the honor of Mituna. “Don’t bother ‘examining’ me. I wouldn’t work for your court if you promised me half your kingdom.”

“Rude! Aranea, what sorta punks are you teaching here? Not that I think that I’m above any of them just because I’m royalty, no, I get that mages choose their own masters and all that shit but you’ve gotta teach them some manners. First your niece, now this boy. I’m just getting my feelings hurt all over the place here.” The King protests, his tone so injured that you want to slap him and show him what a real injury is like. 

The buzz of your bees is echoed under your skin where your blood itches with the desire to let them loose. The runes tattooed on your skin start to glow the same red-blue as your eyes. They want magic? They’ll get it. You’ll show them just what a Mage of Doom can do.

“With all due respect, which is to say none whatsoever because you’re acting like a royal ass, maybe it means something if everyone’s saying that they don’t want to work for you. Like, maybe it means that you should stop being such a lech and start being the kind of king that they’d actually want to serve. It’s Prince Eridan’s chances that you’re wrecking here by being looking at everyone like they’re the serving girls you’re going to tumble once the feast is over. Nobody’s gonna want to work in his court if they think you’re going to exercise your royal prerogative and yes, that was an euphemism.” The sudden stream of words from Prince Dirk stops you from actually attacking. He talks with a certain easy fluency that sits at odds with his casually indifferent tone of voice and certainly nobody who’s mouthing off to royalty should sound so blase about it. This is the sort of behavior that starts wars. Shouldn’t a prince be better mannered than that?

“I’d apologize for my brother’s indiscretion but I happen to agree with him.” And then yet another person chimes in. It really is a good thing that you didn’t invite anyone into your room. They definitely wouldn’t fit now. The newcomer’s wearing a crown made of triangular spikes with odd fretwork along the edges, almost like the teeth of cogs, and his hair and skin are even lighter and pinker than Prince Dirk’s. Clearly the Strider royal family’s lineage has been human-dominated. You can’t see any horns on either of them though with that abundance of hair they both have, perhaps they simply have nubby little horns that are hidden. 

Karkat used to try to comb his hair over his horns but he’s got the worst of both worlds, really — his horns are just tall enough to be difficult to hide but not so tall that they’re anything admirable by troll standards. You once spent a whole hour manipulating a paint brush psionically to color them pink while you distracted him by showing off your latest spells. Then you told them you’d magicked his horns pink and he could only reverse it if he ran naked upstream for at least fifty meters. By the time he’d run the first twenty meters, you were in helpless fits of laughter. 

The glowing of your runes has died down. Somewhere between the arrival of King Strider, whatever his first name may be, and your memories of Karkat, your anger has seeped away to be hidden and held, called upon when it is time to invoke Doom. You take a deep breath and incline a bow towards King Strider, the sort you most definitely did not give King Cronus. The omission is pointed and in its own way, a declaration of war.

“Your Majesty,” You give him one of your best smiles, sharp and dangerous, and your bees buzz back towards their hives, “It is a pleasure to meet a royal who doesn’t believe their blood makes everyone into parasitic fleas.”

“Show some respect,” Eridan breaks in, his initial embarrassment at his King’s behavior apparently erased by the disrespect that the Strider family and you met it with. “He is the King of half the ocean!”

“And the Ruler of the other half of the ocean chose my—” Brother, you nearly say, and have to bite your tongue to prevent, “—Cousin as her Royal Mage and he saved her from the attack of the English Empire. I am not my cousin but I am his equal in skill and psionics and his superior in creating new spells.” 

You wait for either King Cronus or Prince Eridan to say that anyone could be his superior now and vow to strike them into the nearest wall if they do. 

Neither says a word, perhaps because they are too busy conferring with each other in rapid whispers that surely can’t be all that discreet with the Strider royal family standing right next to them and Aranea behind them. The Strider King’s wearing dark shades as well but his are round whereas his heir’s are spiky; you’re still sure that both of them are looking right at you and sizing you up.

“That’s a pretty impressive boast there. I’d like you to come to my court for a full lunar cycle and see how well you fare.” It’s Prince Dirk who speaks, taking a half-step into your room to distance himself from the crowd a little and extending his hand to you. It’s gloved in black leather with a rounded rectangle cut in the back; against Prince Dirk’s skin, a red-violet tattoo glows of a heart sliced open horizontally with one side filled in and the other empty. Everyone has an affiliation but only mages and royals are so closely connected to theirs that they choose to be marked with it so as to better channel it.

“I’d be delighted, your Highness.” You take a second to admire it before you catch his hand in yours and bend low, biting your lip with your sharp teeth and pressing the blood to the wound. Blood-sworn oaths between mages cannot be broken, not without dire consequences to whomever gave the blood. Prince Dirk is not a mage but he is close enough that surely he will understand the gravity of what you have done.

From the little smirk on his lips, you’re sure he also understands that you accepted in part just to further insult the Amporas.


End file.
